Emma McIntyre: An echo, a stain

David Zwirner is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by New Zealand–born, Los Angeles–based artist Emma McIntyre at the gallery’s 69th Street location. This will be the artist’s first exhibition in New York. 

McIntyre’s protean canvases evolve alchemically, transformed by the artist’s interventions and the unbridled organic interactions of her chosen materials: oil, together with unconventional substances like oxidized iron. She begins by pouring paint from above, letting her colors pool, splash, and stretch across her substrate. The artist then reorients her supports and, in a process that is at once intuitive and revelatory, applies additional layers of paint, further modifying her surfaces using brushes, rags, or parts of her body. McIntyre pairs her extemporaneous modes of creation with a repertoire of motifs and compositional strategies gleaned from a close study of art history. Atmospheric yet grounded, McIntyre’s compositions hover between spontaneity and deliberate action; effervescent at the surface, they exist at the edge of perception, forming and reforming before our eyes. 

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Image: Emma McIntyre, Queen of the air, 2023 (detail). Courtesy the artist, Château Shatto, Los Angeles, and David Zwirner, New York